“Well, we couldn’t:  we didn’t dare take the chance of it being spotted.  This has to be a complete surprise.  It’ll be about like the other place, the one the slaves described.  There won’t be any permanent buildings.  This operation only started a few months ago, with the Croutha invasion; it may go on for four or five months, till the Croutha have all their surplus captives sold off.  That country,” he added, gesturing at the screen, “will be flooded out when the rains come.  See how it’s suffered from flood-erosion.  There won’t be a thing there that can’t be knocked down and transposed out in a day or so.”

“I wish you’d let me go along,” Ranthar Jard worried.

“We can’t do that, either,” Vall said.  “Somebody’s got to be in charge here, and you know your own people better than I do.  Beside, this won’t be the last operation like this.  Next time, I’ll have to stay on Police Terminal and command from a desk; I want first-hand experience with the outtime end of the job, and this is the only way I can get it.”

He watched the four police-girls who were working at the big terrain board showing the area of the Police Terminal time line around them.  They had covered the miniature buildings and platforms and towers with a fine mesh, at a scale-equivalent of fifty feet; each intersection marked the location of a three-foot conveyer ball, loaded with a sleep-gas bomb and rigged with an automatic detonator which would explode it and release the gas as soon as it rematerialized on the Abzar Sector.  Higher, on stiff wires that raised them to what represented three thousand feet, were the disks that stood for ten hundred-foot conveyers; they would carry squads of Paratime Police in aircars and thirty-foot air boats.  There was a ring of big two-hundred-foot conveyers a mile out; they would carry the armor and the airborne infantry and the little two-man scooters of the air-cavalry, from the Service and Industrial Sectors.  Directly over the spatial equivalent of the Kholghoor Sector Wizard Traders’ conveyers was the single disk of Verkan Vall’s command conveyer, at a represented five thousand feet, and in a half-mile circle around it were the five news service conveyers.

“Where’s the ship-conveyer?” he asked.

“Actually it’s on antigrav about five miles north of here,” one of the girls said.  “Representationally, about where Subchief Ranthar’s standing.”

Another girl added a few more bits to the network that represented the sleep-gas bombs and stepped back, taking off her earphones.

“Everything’s in place, now, Assistant Verkan,” she told him.

“Good.  I’m going aboard, now,” he said.  “You can have it, Jard.”